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Luke and Han thought that they were going to a briefing to prepare them to destroy the Death Star. Instead, they're getting a sales pitch for the iPad. They're unimpressed. Video by Adam Buxton. Content warning: foul language.

via Nerdcore | Adam Buxton

Redditor unnamed_player found or created an org chart for a university staffed by video game characters. Pictured above is one piece of it. Leisure Suit Larry as a women's studies professor? Sure.

Link via reddit

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This video by YouTube user weareactualsize mashes up a Thanksgiving episode of Friends with The Superfriends. Robin does a very good Phoebe. Also, Superman is a pothead.

via reddit

On his Twitter feed, Leonard Nimoy posted a picture of himself with his son on the set of the original Star Trek. He writes:

The makeup folks put ears on my son Adam to surprise me. A precious moment while shooting the original series.

Link via Digg

The humorists at Mauvais Oeil have a great and very lengthy presentation of Darth Vader's Facebook page, including selections from the episodes 1-3. Yes, the Star Wars Facebook thing has been done before. But not this well. Content warning: some foul language.

Link via reddit

At least, that's what Cyriaque Lamar of io9 argues. He makes a pretty good case. Here's a selection:

4.) The totemic power of shoes. The thing that made it absolutely clear that Sex and the City 2 was a science fiction movie was the scene in which Carrie bought shoes at the souk. In the Sex and the City mythos, plots involving Carrie's shoe are rife with danger and intrigue. Remember the episode in which Carrie's Manolos were stolen at that party? Or when she was mugged for her Manolos in Tribeca? Shoes are the medium with which The City keeps tabs on Carrie - they are The City's harbinger, The City's familiar, and Carrie's tormentor.

Case in point — in Sex and the City 2, Carrie goes to the souk to purchase what appears to be genie shoes (I'm serious). At this point, Carrie's old flame, Aiden Shaw, suddenly appears. Do you know how difficult it is to run into people you know in NYC, let alone in the UAE? Aiden's appearance wasn't just a lazy, ludicrously improbable sop to longtime SATC fans. No, it was The City's machinations keeping Carrie in check. The shoes conspired against her. Ooooh.

When viewed as a rom-com, Sex and the City 2 is terrible and crappy and a horrific inversion of everything the show once was. But when viewed as a science fiction film, SATC2 is subversive, stylish and chilling.

I haven't seen the movie, but I did watch enough of the TV show to decide that I never wanted to date a woman who was a fan of it.

Link | Image: HBO

I remember, about ten years ago, seeing a band of LARPers (live action role-players) doing a combat sequence in the main library of the Ohio State University. It kind of freaked out the librarians, who didn't understand what was happening.

They could have learned a lot from a set of cartoons by Livejournal user Team Dynamite. These explain the purpose, appeal, and basic etiquette of live action role-playing.

I've never LARPed. Have you? Is it fun?

Link via Nerdcore

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The latest installment of Michael Agrusso and Brina's satirical videos about DC and Marvel productions is a musical. Iron Man argues that DC can't top Marvel's narrative continuity. Do you agree?

via Comics Alliance

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A start-up called Feng-GUI has rigged together a crude but functional flight simulator -- and not like a plane, but an Iron Man suit. The user hangs from a hang gliding harness and looks through virtual reality goggles at a computer rendering of a flight path while wind is blown in his face. You can view more pictures of the simulator at the link.

Link via Make

Jesse Starr is an artist who has a knack for using the ordinary ballpoint pen. Above is his amazing portrait of Optimus Prime that was composed with only that instrument.

Link via Geekologie

English Russia, a photoblog of wonders from Russia, has several dozen woodcut illustrations from the edition of The Hobbit published in the Soviet Union. Pictured above is a Gollum quite different from Peter Jackson's. Keep on scrolling past those images, and you can view a video of a movie production of Tolkein's book.

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FeministHulk is a Twitter feed that consists of the Incredible Hulk's opposition to traditional gender roles instituted the patriarchy of contemporary human society. Or, more simply, the Hulk is a feminist.

I discovered FeministHulk via Comics Alliance, which has posted tweets from other feminist superheroes, including Spider-Man, Captain America, and Green Arrow.

Artist Derek Chatwood tries to explain US-Iranian relations, using The Smurfs and Battlestar Galactica as metaphors:

In figure one, we see a classic Battlestar Galactica cylon. It represents the classic leadership of Iran, combining the clerical leadership governed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the political power base, led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It is an artificial construct built on a false premise of freedom and democracy, and as such is slow witted and near impossible to reason with.

The smurfs represent the Iranian people, shown here attacking the cylon. When the smurfs believe that they live in a representative democracy, and it is then shown to be false, they do not take it well. They will climb around and dance and make all sorts of noises. Unfortunately the cylons have been allowed to control them for so long, that they are much more powerful than the smurfs. While it is inspirational to see the smurfs organized, and with one voice denouncing the brutal dictatorship that they now realize they live under, it is also ultimately futile. The cylons are much more powerful, and have blasters and laser cannons.

Link via Popped Culture

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YouTube user bornforthis43 made this great stop-motion animation video showing scenes from classic Nintendo games, including Kirby's Adventure and Mega Man. I doubt that the production budget exceeded five dollars, but the animator brilliantly improvised using everyday objects. It's sort of like Impressionism in that the animator created the unmistakable impression of game levels while using few concrete images.

via Geekosystem

Comics commentator and humorist Chris Sims suggests how six superheroes would write term papers and how they would be graded. Peter Parker apparently understands physics, but not superhero physics.

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